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Archaeology of College Hill 2008 - Home
John Brown House Archaeology Report - 2008
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
During this session we were introduced to the site where we will be working, the yard of the John Nicholas* Brown house. Some geophysical survey had already been done on the site, and a baseline had been laid out. We learned some of the basics of excavation by splitting into groups, which took turns starting test pits along the baseline, while the other groups helped complete the geophys. survey using two methods (I think they were... magentometry and electromagnetic induction survey??). In the test pit that our group started some small, thick, whitish tiles were uncovered in the excavation, along with remains of various other construction materials (what we took to be brick, mortar, etc.). The other test pit turned up nails and I can't recall what else. So far I have noticed how different digging here will be from the field school I did this past summer in northern Arizona, since the environments and the kinds of artifacts we are sampling for are so different. I think it will be really valuable to re-learn excavation in a different kind of environment, so although I worry that some things will be review, I'm optimistic about the class.
*EDIT: oops. There are a lot of Browns. John Nicholas Brown is an ancestor who owned the house for a time, but who is associated with the house to the south, now the John Nicholas Brown center....at least I think, this is confusing.
This week began with a tour of the John Brown House from Dan (last name?), their curator in charge of education on the house. We were brought in (around some work that was going on while we were there) and shown a video about the history of the Brown family and the house. I like how clearly Dan presented the datails of the house, and how we know them (even the specific documents they were tied to). He did a good job of describing the decisions that were made in restoring the house, which are closely related, but extremely different from, the decisions that you would make when restoring or conserving a single object for museum display, as we are discussing this week in another class I am taking, Classical Art at the RISD museum). Like a marble statue or a ceramic piece, you have to bring the house back to a state where a visitor can visualize and learn about how the house was in the past. At the same time you have to create an awareness of a long and multi-faceted history since the house changed so much over time, and was changed again in restoration, creating a contemporary result that the modern visitor appreciates in a totally different way than the carver of the sculpture or owner of the house would have appreciated it in their own time. These thoughts are still not all that coherent, but this is cool stuff to me. Excavations in the STP at N0 W35 continued, though slowly, turning up more rock and brick and tile. Since things have shown up in a serious jumble, with a pattern being hard to determine, it looks like we might be looking at a dump for construction materials of some sort, at least as a working hypothesis, but of course it is impossible to know from such a small sample area. I think opening a unit nearby would be a helpful thing. Actually, I think a whole field season here would be a helpful thing.
This week Ben and I continued (and hopefully finished) excavations on the northernmost of the two shovel test pits. We continued through the stratum that the previous group had worked on, uncovering large stones in the otherwise homogenous soil. Beyond that we got into a layer with a clayey texture that was filled with oyster and clam shells. We collected two bags worth of these while excavating just a few centimeters deeper into the clay, generally toward the east side of the shovel test pit. It makes me curious to know how fast shells decay in this kind of environment, certainly they were buried there as trash, but during what era? That will have to be left alone for now, due to the decision to close off the test pits and move promptly into unit 3, which is near the wall that overlooks Benefit St. Accordingly, we mapped the profile of the STP and finished just at the end of class. I had to run off, but I believe the plan was to backfill after we left. I am looking forward to opening up a new unit next week.
We opened a new unit this week, unit 4, and began excavation. Not much in the way of artifacts was uncovered, the most interesting finds were come pennies form 1967 and 1971, which gave us an earliest possible date for the deposition of the topsoil. It was muggy and I got quite a few mosquito bites, but that's rather a breeze compared to the ants at Homol'ovi. I wrote up the field notes for my unit this week, so a detailed summary of our excavations is available on 2008 Excavation & Unit Summaries.
We continued excavations in unit 4, again with the intention of digging down a 10cm level. It's starting to get cold. Digging was slow going, with very gravelly soil that took a long time to sift through because of all the pebbles and small rocks. We didn't make it very far (about 3cm or so) before running into a a new and lighter colored soil context. As we expanded and cleared down to it we found a large rectangular stone that is right in line with the large blue feature on the geophysical survey results. It marked a very clear soil boundary. Light and gravelly to the east, mottled and finely-textured to the west, with a band of slightly darker gravelly soil in line with the stone, that we will excavate next time as three separate contexts. We will not excavate next monday for the holiday.
This week went very qucikly. We worked in a new context, JBH 19 on the west side of our unit. We only got down 10cm in that small area over the course of the day, and found that feature 4 is relatively thin, since the bottom of it was only a couple of cm down from where we started. We found some pieces of brick, a large nail, some glass, some sherds and a few other small things. It was not the most interesting week, but the time went fast. We aren't any closer to knowing exactly what the blue feature from the geophysical survey really is.
This week we uncovered the rubble fill of what seems to be some kind of structural feature, continuing to the north and east of feature 4. It contains gravel, and occaisional large rocks and broken bricks. We do not yet have a clear idea of what it is, but the same stratigraphic patterns seems to be showing up in units 3 and 5 to the north of us. By the end of the day we bagan a plan map of where we stopped excacavating.
This was our second to last week of digging. The end of daylight savings meant that we lost our light almost completely by 4:30, and so digging began at 1:30. I didn't arrive until 2, but Whitney and I finished the plan map (designating the wall from last week JBH 37 and feature 6) and began to dig west of the wall, getting down perhaps 15cm or so of the 20 that we were hoping to finish that day. It was frustrating to be working at near dusk toward the end of the session, but we uncovered quite a number of artifacts in the loose fill to the west, just as the group excavating unit 3 had found in what seems to be a corresponding stratum.
Our last week of digging went by really quickly. We got down approximately 10 more cm overall on the west side of the wall, and stopped digging to start wrapup work by around 3:15 or so. We lost light quickly and it began to get cold. We took photos of all four walls and feature 4, and then drew a profile map of the south wall. It was all kind of a blur. We backfilled and that's that, from here on our work will be in the lab. It was very obvious to me that would could not dig in subsequent weeks even if we wanted to, considering the light and weather.
This week we learned more about the different types of artifacts that are commonly found at sites of this type. A lot of different types were covered, with a lot of information coming pretty fast. We spent a long time discussing different types of ceramics, and there is a lot of information to keep straight, but it was interesting. Then we continued to wash artifacts (after a brief mixup since we didn't know to be washing in unit order) and spent about an hour on that. I was really tired, since the show is this weekend, but feeling fine.
My remembering to write has fallen off accidentally. As of now we are almost finished cataloguing our artifacts, and things are proceeding steadily. I'm getting information together about unit 4, but at this point not sure where to start as far as dating the different strata goes. Generally I'm satisfied with where I am at, although I've learned just how unexciting cataloguing is, wow. I don't think I have much else to say at this point.